Culture in Miniature: Toy Dogs and Object Life

Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close
range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. —Walter Benjamin [1]

In April 2007, National Human Genome Research Institute
scientists
published their discovery of a single gene responsible
for the smallness of small dogs. The research showed that minute
genetic mutations can determine the vast difference between
a
chihuahua
and a Great Dane, two creatures that are poles apart
but nonetheless share the elastic designation “dog.”[2] Canine diversity
and amenability to being domesticated, bred, and continually
shaped into new combinations owes something to the little dogs
that, over the centuries, have conveniently fit into the intimate and
increasingly crowded spaces of human transport,
migration, and
settlement. In some cases, they have maintained
a high degree
of genetic variability despite long histories of being inbred and
selected for the desirable physical and “personality” traits that
constitute
modern breed standards, fill the pages of illustrious
stud book lineages, and, unfortunately, also produce numerous
genetic disorders. The recent genomic breakthrough
further links
the fates of human animals to their canine diminutives
in that
these inbred
disorders can now be studied for disease genes relevant
to saving human lives. The toy dog, it appears, is far more
than mere accessory.

The life of a miniature presents a peculiar type of commodity.
Its value as a fetish object stems from its small size and multiplies
with each iteration of scale downward even to the level of the gene.[3] Specimens of bio-capital with extractive genomic worth, small
dogs at the same time defy utility through their uncanny ability
to “embody sheer delight.”[4] Such excess and anti-functionalism
inhere in the very classification of the “Toy Dog” as a double
negation:
a diminutive of the “Non-Sporting Dog,” which in
turn counters the properly active “Sporting Dog.”[5] In this way,
modern classifications assign to the petite canine the sought-after
virtues of both an original, or key to life, and a derivative, or copy.
If the plasticity of dogs makes them adaptable to recombinant
breeds, the miniature embodies the challenge of replicating the
idea of dog-ness while stretching the limits of the species in the
pursuit of a novelty that ultimately showcases the marvels of
technological
innovation. Western attempts to categorize the toy
dog, from the eighteenth century on, reveal a striking correlation
between size, uniqueness, and the commodity form. A lapdog’s
smallness makes it an accessory seeming to lack intrinsic value
of its own; it not only circulates with ease, but its meaning is also
articulated metonymically through its resemblance to proximate
companion objects and humans. And yet, the miniature also
invites a scrutinizing gaze upon the singularity of its form. Its
intricacy of detail signals the labour of its making, namely the
human manipulation of the natural world into a desirable breed.
Such is the appeal of a copied life, that which encapsulates the
techniques of reproducibility and mimicry at the heart of modern
consumer culture.

Replicas of bigger, more substantive originals, toy dogs rarely
stand alone; their scale places them in relation to other, often
inanimate, things, and they beg to be part of a collection or greater
narrative—cultural, national, and biographical (see Figures 1–3).
Breeds such as the King Charles spaniel and the pug have long
been affiliated with luxury and European aristocracy; they are
the indoor counterparts to the robust horses and hunting dogs of
royal recreation, and in their capacity as status symbols they sit in
the lady’s lap or at the family’s feet in numerous seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century portraits. From within the painted frame, these creatures at once emblematize and witness a world of patronage
and pedigree. In their smallness, they direct our attention to the
finely wrought details of dress and ornamentation that convey
publicly the intimate life of the nobility. In English history, the
legends of great men have been told through little dogs, and vice
versa. These are, one must keep in mind, mutually constructed
biographies. Whereas Charles i and ii were paired with their
spaniels to distinguish
the Stuart line of royal succession, the
so-called “Dutch pug” that saved the life of William i, Prince of
Orange, furthered the repute of a heroic, non-hereditary line
of English monarchy. As the legend goes, William’s little white
dog scratched him awake one night in the Low Countries as the
Spanish were attacking his camp; his defence of the Netherlands
would earn him the title of founding father of the Dutch Republic,
and his grandson William iii would eventually become, through
marriage to Mary, the king of England in 1689. The House of
Orange thus brought with it an inherited love of pugs and a
devout Protestant line.[6]

The lore of religious patriotism and unbroken pedigree belies
another story of origins and value: the long-distance borrowing
and lending that transported little dogs from East Asia along with
companion commodities such as tea and porcelain.
Together, these
future metonyms of Englishness and empire embodied a form of
cosmopolitan value through the dual fetishization of pure origins
and endless cross-species as well as cross-cultural mixture. What
Donna Haraway has studied as the dog’s “trans-species encounter
value,” we might expand to include its transcultural encounter
value.[7] The Asiatic origin of the toy dog, as bred and rendered in art
and in life, assigns the China trade a critical role in shaping species
categorization and the representation of human-animal relations.
Factoring objects into these relations provides a more complete
picture of a greater chain of being at work across eighteenthcentury
consumer culture. The empirical resemblances between
human and non-human animals posited by eighteenth-century classification systems of natural history are explored in parallel by
the economics and poetics of classifying miniature dog life, or by
the “social life of things.”[8] By tracing the intertwined biographies
of the toy dog and the East-West commodity exchanges of early
modern England, we can better understand the power of ornament,
craft, and miniaturization upon innovations in aesthetics as
well as the life sciences. In the object-organism spectrum, art not
only imitates life, but also, in effect, breeds it.[9]

Classifying the Eastern Toy

By current kennel standards, “toy” designates a group that includes
some twenty or so breeds of dogs that share not much more than
their small size.[10] The toy dog has long troubled taxonomy, and its
classification history is one of borrowed legitimacies. The earliest
official record of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary is an 1806
entry under “toy”: “Applied to an animal, esp. a dog of a diminutive
breed or variety, kept as a pet, e.g. a toy spaniel or terrier.”[11] By the mid-nineteenth century, with the advent of dog shows and
increased efforts to systematize breed standards, toys became a
class of their own, although still identified by their attachments
to others. The authoritative J.H. Walsh, or “Stonehenge,” included
a section titled “Ladies’ Toy Dogs” in British Rural Sports, first
published
in 1855.[12] Long before this, references to small dogs had appeared in texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most
cited example being John Caius’s entry in Of Englishe Dogges: the Melitaeus, or Canie delicates, a “delicate, neate, and pretty kind of
dogge called the Spaniel gentle or the comforter [of women]” from
the island of Malta.[13] Centuries later, the connection between the
“Comforter” spaniel and the female sex continued to be reiterated,
as in naturalist and artist Thomas Bewick’s description of an
“elegant little animal … generally kept by the ladies as an attendant
of the toilette or the drawing-room.”[14]

The works of other eighteenth-century natural historians also
included theories that the “shock dog,” “pet dog,” and “lion dog”
were simply lesser versions of larger canines. In his Natural History,
General and Particular, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
applied the same climactic determinism to dogs as to humans. Of
the thirty varieties of dogs listed, seventeen were defined by the
“influence of climate,” which entailed the propensity to shrink,
lose hair, change voice or colour—in short to “become ugly”—in
the north or in “warm” places such as Turkey or Persia.[15] The
other thirteen types, including the three most popular lapdogs
of the period—the “shock dog,” pug, and King Charles spaniel—were simply “copies” of the primary group.

Little dogs appear only as cursory addenda to histories of
“useful” hunting dogs until the early twentieth century, when
the “oriental” character of the breed group was established.
Against previous accounts tracing the dogs to Spain, Holland,
or Italy, Judith Lytton, in the influential Toy Dogs and their
Ancestors, argued emphatically for the Chinese ancestry of toy
spaniels in particular. For those who followed her lead, the link
would prove to be elusive, irresistibly suggestive, and yet selfevident,
if only by the sheer force of analogy. After all, Lytton wrote, “compiling a history of the Toy Spaniel breeds has been
like unravelling a Chinese puzzle.”[16] Art and etymology become
precious evidence in attempts by dog historians to match known
breeds with the images in countless paintings and to unravel the
often mistranslated textual references to stock names such as “King
Charles” or “Shock.” The challenge of pinpointing the origins of
the small dog is part of the storyteller’s and breeder’s shared delight
in shaping difficult material, and in recognizing the hybridity of
their subject matter even while attempting to preserve and replicate
a pure form. In one instance, Lytton laments the degeneration of
the breed and professes her commitment
to reintroducing the
original spaniel type based on its representation
in the paintings
of Paolo Veronese and Antoine Watteau.[17] The miniature dog of
art is, in this case, the model for the living object, which in turn
bears the mark of Western breeding and the added import value
of Eastern exoticism.

To take one notable example, the pug is necessarily a different
beast today than it was centuries ago, but the name functions as
a cultural palimpsest of interactions between races, species, and
commodities. Past and ongoing efforts to authenticate the toy
dog’s ancestry illustrate the force of analogy that links a spectrum
of objectified life. In the eighteenth century, a “pug” was defined as
diminutive in the broadest sense: a term of endearment, any type
of dwarfed animal, or an epithet for a lower-caste human such
as a prostitute or a ship’s servant boy.[18] Before denoting lapdog,
“pug” referred to monkey; the transfer of monikers indicates
their shared status as exotic, domesticated pets as well as the perceived
resemblances in appearance and “character” potentially
transferable across species. For instance, the likeness between monkey and dog was considered a result of their common descent
through interbreeding in Edward Topsell’s 1604 explanation of
the small “mimicke dog,” seen to display apelike qualities and
thought to be “conceived by an Ape, for in wite & disposition it
resembleth an ape, but in face sharpe and blacke like a Hedghog.”[19] An interplay of homology, metaphor, and metonymy is similarly
at work in the racialized adjective “pug-nosed,” a shorthand for
ugliness applied to humans that intimates the Afro-Asiatic origins
of monkey and dog and the features for which they were known—stout, dark faces.
Following the massive influx to Europe of Asian commodities
and the products of African slave labour, the onset of industrialization
and technological developments in the ceramic arts
influenced a further turn of phrase and created another link in
the associative chain: “pug” also came to refer to a type of plastic
clay used for pottery and brickmaking. This material could be
shaped into an array of forms, mimicking that most plastic of
Eastern imports, porcelain. The history of pet classification is thus
one of migrating signifiers: traits are imagined to transfer across
objects and species, racializing humans and non-humans alike.
The miniature enacts a certain promiscuity, as suggested by the
pug’s connotations of erotic servitude (prostitute), overseas travel
(ship’s servant boy), and the emotional responses that vacillate
between affection and revulsion. In other words, the miniature
travels in the service of desire. Its changing attachments and
propensity towards being exchanged make it at once an object
difficult to classify and a powerful instrument for gauging human
attributes and affect.

Perhaps the most troubling legacy of mapped resemblances
between canine and human can be seen in ongoing efforts to prove
the Eastern origins of the pug. Dog historian Robert Leighton
thought the pug must have originated in China, “particularly in
view of the fact that it is with that country that most of the bluntnosed
toy dogs, with tails curled over their backs, are associated.”[20] Another writer calls the pug “a typical Chinese dog; the short nose,
bold, prominent eyes, and curled tail.”[21] And one J. Nave, a breeder
of the 1880s, praised the “the nature of the Japanese” in the King
Charles spaniel: “We shall be glad to see a fresh importation of
Japanese Spaniels so as to revive the short nose again.”[22] The arrival
of Pekingese dogs from China following the 1860 Anglo-French
invasion and looting of the imperial Summer Palace has been well
documented; James Watson, for one, touted the “pure Chinese
stock” of Click, whose parents Lamb and Moss “were Chinese
beyond dispute.”[23] Further noting the “pushed-in” heads of English
and Japanese toy spaniels, he declared, “there is no getting away
from the obvious, the very plain indication that the pug was an
oriental importation.”[24]

2 The mapping of the dog genome sequence was completed in December 2005,
and subsequent research related to the project reveals that small dogs have a
gene variant that represses the gene IGF1 (insulin-like growth factor 1). See,
for example, Elaine Ostrander, “A Single IGF1 Allele Is a Major Determinant
of Small Size in Dogs,” Science 316, no. 5821 (2007): 112–15. DOI: 10.1126/
science.1137045 See also J.R. Minkel, “Gene Makes Small Dogs Small,” Scientific American (5 April 2007), http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-small-dogs-sma.

6 Roger Williams, The Actions of the Lowe Countries (London, 1618). More
recent writers have contested the identification of the dog as a pug. See Robert
Hutchinson, For the Love of Pugs (San Francisco: Brown Trout Publishers,
1998); and Nick Waters, The Pug Heritage and Art (Eindhoven: BB Press, 2005.)

8 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

9 An earlier version of this essay benefited from participants’ feedback at
Finding Animals: Toward a Comparative History and Theory of Animals,
a conference presented by the Visualizing Animals group at Penn State,
University Park, PA, 30 April–1 May 2009.

10 The American Kennel Club, for example, includes the following, with the
caveat that small breeds can also be found under other groups: affenpinscher;
Brussels griffon; Cavalier King Charles spaniel; chihuahua; Chinese crested;
English toy spaniel; Havanese; Italian greyhound; Japanese Chin; Maltese;
Manchester terrier; miniature pinscher; papillon; Pekingese; Pomeranian;
poodle; pug; Shih Tzu; silky terrier; toy fox terrier; Yorkshire terrier. www.akc.org/breeds/toy_group.cfm. The UK Kennel Club lists a slightly different
assortment of breeds. http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/services/public/breed/Default.aspx?group=TOY.

11 OED, 2nd ed. (1989); online version March 2012 (earlier version first published
in New English Dictionary, 1913), s.v. “toy, n.” www.oed.com/view/Entry/204133

12 I cite the 7th ed. of British Rural Sports (London, 1867), which included several
breeds of toy dogs: the Italian greyhound, Maltese, toy terrier, lion dog,
small poodle, Blenheim spaniel, and Pomeranian. By the 12th ed. of 1875, “Toy Dogs” was included as a formal heading in the table of contents. The
earliest mentions of the formal designation “Toy Dog” that I have found are
J.G. Wood, Illustrated Natural History (London, 1851) and an 1852 advertisement
for a dog show. Both these sources are cited in Waters (17, 43).

13 John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges the Diversities, the Names, the Natures, and
the Properties (London, 1576), 21. References are to this edition. (The work
was published originally in Latin in 1570 as Johannus Caius, De Canibus
Britannicus.)

14 Thomas Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle upon Tyne,
1790), 312.

16 Judith Lytton, Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors (New York: D. Appleton, 1911),
11. She argues that the Chinese dog is the ancestor of the red-and-white toy
(Blenheim) spaniel, the Japanese black-and-white spaniel, and the Pekingese
(250). The original King Charles spaniel was curly and black, and was crossed
with the Pyrame to get the black-and-tan modern King Charles (66, 79). For
background on Lytton’s work and an in-depth analysis of nineteenth-century
pet-keeping, breeding, and showing, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate:
The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989).

17 Lytton, 79.

18 OED, 3rd ed. (2007); online version June 2012 (earlier version first published
in New English Dictionary, 1909), s.v. “pug, n.2” www.oed.com/view/Entry/154210

19 Edward Topsell, The History of Foure-Footed Beastes and Serpents (London,
[1658]), 161. References are to this edition.

20 Robert Leighton, The Complete Book of the Dog (London: Cassell, 1952), 273.